Thermal management can be critical in many applications. Excessive heat can cause damage to or degrade the performance of mechanical, chemical, electric, and other types of devices. Thermal management becomes more critical as technology advances and newer devices continue to become smaller and more complex, and as a result run at higher power levels and/or power densities.
Modern devices often include various electronic circuits or components, each of which may be capable of generating heat or thermal energy. As these components are often critical to the operation of the device, inadequate cooling can result in system crashes, lockups, surprise reboots, and other errors. The risk of such problems can become especially acute in the tight confines found inside devices, such as computing devices, personal computers, servers and other computing and electronic devices with a high density of components.
Prior methods for dealing with such cooling problems have included using vent systems in the walls of a device. As the amount of cooling air available within computing device is reduced as the device is scaled down, alternative approaches are advantageous due to the confined space and reduced weight.